Tag Archives: Mike Lazaridis

Mobile money transfer specialist, Monitise, has surprised its investors by recruiting a former Visa executive in the shape of Elizabeth Buse. She becomes co-CEO to work alongside Monitise co-founder Alastair Lukies. As soon as the news came out, shares in Monetise rose 4.3 per cent. GoMo News can’t understand why this news was such a surprise when Buse was previously a member of the Monitise board from July 2010 to October 2012. Buse was most recently the executive vp of Visa’s global solutions group, a role she took in August 2013. Continue reading →

It seems that one of the men who founded Research in Motion (RIM) which is now Canada’s BlackBerry smartphone maker has abandoned his attempt to retake control of his old company. Mike Lazaridis who formed an alliance with another former BlackBerry exec, Doug Fregin, to try to back back BlackBerry has abandoned the attempt. He signaled the end to this venture by selling a tranche of his BlackBerry shares which raised around $26 million (£16 million). That cut his overall share holding in Canada’s prized ITC company from 5.7 per cent to below 5 per cent. Continue reading →

The battle for BlackBerry looks set to go the wire with just two days left before its board has decide whether to go with the $4.7 billion cash offer from major stakeholder Prem Watsa, or accept a rival bid – assuming there’s one on the table.
Co-founders Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin, who’ve already hinted they’d be interested, were last night [1st November 2013] reported to be forming their own consortium in which Cerberus Capital Management and US chip maker Qualcomm are included. If successful, it could resolve the doubts about the future of the company given that Watsa has yet to say where his support is coming from.
Much could hinge on Monday’s deadline [4th November 2013], with the Cerberus-backed team holding back to see if Watsa’s bid definitely materialises and, if so, on what terms. Continue reading →

The takeover battle for troubled Canadian smartphone pioneer, BlackBerry, has taken yet another twist, with news that social networking site Facebook could now be in the bidding. There are just two working days to go before BlackBerry’s board is meant to decide on the original $4.7 billion offer from former director Prem Watsa, though he has yet to name who else is in his consortium. Other rumoured suitors include Samsung, Google and Chinese giant Lenovo. Co-founder Mike Lazaridis and even former Apple CEO John Sculley have been mentioned. But with next Monday’s deadline [4th November 2013] fast looming, and at which point the BlackBerry board will need to decide on if to take Watsa’s $9 a share offer, the Wall Street Journal is now reporting a possible last-minute bid by Facebook. Continue reading →

BlackBerry’s founders are the latest to consider making a bid for the ailing smartphone maker, securities filings have revealed.
Former CEO Mike Lazaridis, who resigned last year after nearly three decades at the helm, and one-time vice president Douglas Fregin, are considering throwing their hat in the ring as the deadline for BlackBerry’s current board to make a decision fast approaches.
On the table at present is a $4.7 billion offer from Fairfax Holdings, led by another former director Prem Watsa. His unnamed consortium is at present examining the books of the Canadian manufacturer as part of due diligence procedures, with just three weeks to go before the BlackBerry board has to decide whether to go ahead with his offer or consider rival bids. Continue reading →

In its fourth quarter results announced today [March 28th 2013], BlackBerry revealed modest figures for its latest BB10 handset. It revealed that one in six of all BlackBerry handsets shipped had, in fact, been a Z10. It had also shipped around 370,000 BlackBerry PlayBooks (tablets). BlackBerry CEO, Thorsten Heins, appeared happy at the strength of support BB10 had been getting from developers and partners worldwide. Continue reading →

Someone obviously believes Research in Motion has a future. Toronto-based Fairfax Financial Holdings has become the struggling manufacturer’s single biggest shareholder after doubling its stake.
From a four year high of around $148 RIM’s share price has plunged massively to around the $6 – $7 mark prompting speculation that the company could be doomed. Continue reading →

Technology journalist, Alysa Jeff, takes you back over the BlackBerry maker’s recent history

Mike Lazaridis, who founded the firm back in 1984, served as the CEO of BlackBerry maker, Research in Motion (RIM), until very recently with the co-chief, Jim Balsillie. The two were heading the firm; however, as of now both Lazaridis and Balsillie have quit, and forwarded Thorsten Heins to take charge of their position as the firm’s chief. Prior to the departure of Lazaridis and Balsillie, RIM was experiencing some turbulence as it faced some serious competition. The maker of the BlackBerry recently underwent a phase where it was unable to provide even its services. Continue reading →

There seems to be a general consensus – in light of no official confirmation from Research in Motion (RIM) – that probably the most popular and useful app given away by the BlackBerry maker as part of its Thank You Gift campaign was Drivesafe.ly. This app performs text-to-speech conversion (pretty effectively in our humble opinion) so that any received emails or text messages will be read out to you as you drive along. The app is produced by iSpeech.org which also decided to contribute its iSpeech Translator Pro app to the mix. Better still there were Enterprise and Pro versions of Drivesafe.ly in the giveaway. Continue reading →

When RIM suffered its three day outage, RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis, said, “We have apologised to our customers and we will work tirelessly to restore their confidence.” This doesn’t seem to be working. He also said, “We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience.” Part of that gratitude was to offer RIM’s enterprise customers a month of free technical support. Details are available here. Consumers, on the other hand, were offered twelve free apps. RIM promised, “The complete selection of premium apps will become available to download at BlackBerry App World over a period of four weeks beginning Wednesday, October 19th [2011]. Ten days later and only two apps (one a game) have been made available. * (See update below). This has led to considerable discontent amongst BlackBerry owners. One GoMo News reader wrote here, “Two weeks and only two crappy apps! What a sincere apology, BB!” Here we explain how to get the free apps if your BlackBerry won’t show them. Continue reading →

As the London riots so dramatically proved, the BlackBerry is the smartphone of choice for the younger generation and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) is the IM [Instant Messaging] service which they know and love. So why not add a touch of social networking, a sprinkle of cloud computing and a love for music to the mix? Which is exactly what RIM has done by launching a nedw service called BBM Music. The company is cheating somewhat when it points out that participants will have access to tracks from the Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI. That’s because RIM has hooked BBM straight up to Omnifone‘s existing backend service and Omnifone already has such relationships in place. BBM Music is currently in a closed beta trial of the BBM Music service in Canada, the United States and the UK. GoMo News will see if we can get to join in. Continue reading →

Hot on the heels of the project to run Android apps under webOS (here) and the news that Alibaba‘s Aliyun can run Android apps, a report from Bloomberg here speculates that RIM smartphones will be able to do so by “early 2012.” This facility will be courtesy of the QNX OS which RIM acquired when it bought the company. A version of QNX is used for RIM’s tablet – the PlayBook. Back in June [2011], Mike Lazaridis, RIM’s co-CEO, told analysts that an update to the PlayBook with the Android app player in it could come “later in the summer.” Bloomsberg’s sources are therefore guessing that RIM is working on QNX smartphones which would have the Android app player built in. Continue reading →